Buckingham Theater
235 N. Glebe Road,
Arlington,
VA
22203
235 N. Glebe Road,
Arlington,
VA
22203
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The Buckingham Theater opened in 1939 and closed in 1986. The building now serves as the Buckingham Station Post Office.
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Lost Memory
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Recent comments (view all 7 comments)
The Buckingham was built with the Buckingham Apartments. The name Buckingham is from the dairy farm that occupied the area before the apartments. Single screen, projection equipment was typical Neighborhood Theatres of Virginia fare.. E-7s with Peerless Magnarcs..
Washington Post of September 25, 1939 notes “Thursday night” (Sept, 28, 1939) “swank dedication of the new Buckingham Theater, Arlington Virginia”
Here is a April 2008 photo of the former Buckingham Theatre.
Another picture, no date, early 50s?
View link
Unfortunately, that link does not seem to work anymore; it may be that the library uses one of those dumb search mechanisms that only generates temporary URLs.
The picture can be found by going to the Library of Virginia’s Main Page: http://www.lva.virginia.gov/, and then clicking on “Digital Collections” under “For the Public”. Then click on “Online Photo Collections” then on “Digitool” and then search for “Buckingham Theater” when the Digitool window comes up. It should not have to be this complicated.
I have some great memories of The Buckingham Theater. It was within walking distance of my parents home in Arlington Forest. I can remember them running Saturday kids shows during the summer months in the late Fifties or early Sixties. They’d have some cartoons, some Three Stooges shorts, a serial chapter and a feature. I can also remember the old days where you could pay once and stay through the film as many times as you wanted. A friend of mine went to see, I believe it was “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” one winter… watched it, came out, it was snowing a blizzard, so we went back inside and watched it through again until the snow stopped. Great memories of this old theater! At least they didn’t tear it down!
Possibly because the theater was adjacent to the large Buckingham garden apartment complex, it seemed to be the venue chosen for releases … and re-releases … of Disney’s animated features. When I was a kid, I enjoyed a lot of talking animals there.